The Executive Summary submission deadline was today. Nate had most of this ready to go from before, although he had to pare it down from 6 pages to just 3. We did have to add a sustainability section which neither of us fully understood. I ended up working on that. The CCTO is supposed to provide a Sustainability Handbook, but I guess that will not be available until after the deadline, so I had to do the best I could. In any case, we’ve submitted the Executive Summary, and now we wait until July 26 to see if we make it to the finals.

I’ve had a couple more meetings with Nate over the past couple weeks. We’ve talked about a lot of different aspects of the business opportunity, mostly during meetings in Oakland. We have pretty much decided to work together on this venture. We still don’t have a company name, but the team name for the CCTO is Euclid Street Technologies. This name has to do with the fact that his office at Berkeley is on Euclid Avenue (I guess Street sounded better). In any case, I have joined his CCTO team. We’re still looking for a marketing/business persion to fill out our founding team.

The basic premise for the company is summed up in our objective from the executive summary:

“Euclid Street Technologies (EST) offers a controls solution to the homeowner who wants better climate comfort from their central HVAC system and a lower monthly utility bill. The Distributed Thermostat is a thermal control solution that reduces room-to-room variations, temperature swings, and your utility bill. Unlike a programmable thermostat, our product understands the behavior of every room in your home.”

Today was the first of the Innovator Symposium Series presented by the CCTO. The symposium series is intended to touch on each of the six market area addressed by the competition categories: Air, Water & Waste; Energy Efficiency; Green Building; Renewables; Smart Power; and Transportation. Today’s symposium was on Smart Power and was hosted by AMD, the category sponsor. The even was set up as a panel discussion. After a brief presentation about the competition by Mike Santullo of the CCTO, they jumped into the panel. The moderator was Dallas Kachan from Inside Greentech. The panelists included:

• Dallas Kachan - Inside Greentech (moderator)
• Ellen Petrill - EPRI
• Stewart Ramsay - Consultant and former VP at PG&E
• Scott McGaraghan - EnerNOC
• Steve Vassallo - Foundation Capital

Each panelist gave a brief introduction to what they do, then there was a moderated discussion followed by Q&A from the audience. It was interesting to see that EnerNOC had gone public less than a month or two ago. They focus on an area known as Demand Response which is basically providing a way for the utility companies to reduct the load on the grid. EnerNOC does this by aggregating a bunch of corporations willing to reduce power when called upon, and selling this service to the utility. There are some possibilities for us to provide this functionality to our customers as well, though it is challenging to aggregate enough home users to make it viable. Most of this symposium focused on technology for improving the grid, though the CCTO Smart Power category has a more broad definition.

On June 9, Mary and I went to a benefit barbecue for the Wildlife Education and Rehabilitation Center (WERC)in San Martin, CA. The center is located in Morgan Hill and it’s primary goal is the rehabilitation of injured and orphaned animals. Most of the animals that go to WERC are eventually released back into the wild. In some cases the animal’s injuries are too severe to make a complete recovery. In these cases these animals are used for education programs. Some of the educational animals were present at the BBQ, including:

Ariel - a Merlin, which is a type of small falcon. Merlins hunt other birds by catching them in flight. Ariel came to WERC with a damaged wing which never healed completely. As such, she is not able to fly well enough to hunt on her own, so she has become on of WERCs educational animals.

Horus - a Peregrine Falcon, considered the fastest animal on earth. In it’s hunting dive, called a stoop, it can streamline it’s body and reach over 200 MPH. Horus also has a defective wing and can not survive in the wild. It is quite a treat to see such a spectacular animal.

Loki - a Great Horned Owl, one of the larger of the owl species. Loki was found abandoned at a young age by a well meaning person. However, by raising the owl by hand, the person inadvertently caused to Loki to imprint on humans. He does not really know that he’s an owl.

Oscar - a Western Screech Owl, one of the smaller species of owl. Oscar was found near the side of a road, apparently having collided with a car. The people at WERC were able to rehabilitate him, but his right eye was damaged to the point of blindness. The eye is still there, but it appears black now.

WERC has helped a lot of animals over the years, not just birds. On a couple of occasions they have successfully raised and reintroduced orphaned bobcat kittens. Check out their website to read about some of their success stories. They accept donations via PayPal if you’re so inclined. You can see more pictures of the birds above on my gallery, just click on the pictures or their names.

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Yesterday I met with Nathan at his office in UC Berkeley. He showed me some of the prototypes he’s been working on and we talked a bit more about how we could work together. Some of the technology will come from the Residential Energy Manager project at Berkeley. I also met Nathan’s adviser, Professor Paul Wright. He will most likely be involved with this venture as an adviser or something.

Today I went to the CCTO Executive Summary Workshop at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Nathan was also there. This even was intended to provide more information on what the CCTO was looking for in the executive summaries. The executive summaries are due on June 30 and will be used to select the finalists. The CCTO submission could be no more than 3 pages and had to include the following sections: Opening Statement, Target Market, Team, Product/Solution, Market Strategy, Sustainability, and Financials. The sections are pretty typical of most business plans, except for the sustainability section. Since this is a clean tech competition, they want the contestants to focus on the environmental impact their companies will have and not just the products.

The workshop was ok, but I’m not sure I got much out of it. Most of the information could be gleaned simpley by using the executive summary template on the CCTO website. They focused the most on the sustainability section, which makes sense since it’s different from the typical business plan flow. However, I don’t think they covered all that well. I think I was still a bit confused about the expectations by the end. I guess I’ll have to figure it out at some point.

I was playing around with a website called EnergyRace. If you join and go through their questionnaire, they give you a rough estimate of your carbon footprint. Later, you can indicate any changes you have made to you car, home, etc. and they show you ho much you have reduced your footprint. They even give you a little badge you can put on your website with your latest results:

It looks like I still have some improvements to make.

There’s a similar site encouraging and tracking the use of Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (CFL) called One Billion Bulbs. They provide ratings of various CFLs, and if you create an account, they will show you how much money and carbon you are saving as you switch to CFLs.

After exchanging a few emails, I met up with Nathan at a Starbucks in Oakland. It turns out he’s been looking for someone with experience in developing electronic devices and software. We seems to hit it off. It was interesting to find out we not only both attended the same university for undergrad (Carnegie Mellon), but we both played rugby there as well! What a small world. We’re planning to get together again next week to continue our discussion.

I ended up going to the California Clean Tech Open (CCTO) Technology and Entrepreneur Matching Event on Monday. It was pretty interesting, but as I feared, most of the research technologies being presented were way outside my areas of expertise. Most of them were related to alternative fuels and large scale energy production.

There were a bunch of guys running around with CalCars t-shirts. CalCars is a non-profit initiative promoting plug-in hybrid cars. They have a plug-in modified Toyota Prius (left) that is getting over 100 MPG. Basically they added additional rechargeable batteries with the ability to charge them by plugging in to a standard residential power plug (right - the plug receptacle is on the left of the bumper just above the word “THIS”). The added battery allows this Prius to run much longer on the electric motor without needing to use the gas engine. Apparently this group is looking to spin off a for-profit company, which I guess is why they were at the event.

I did make one interesting contact at the event. I met a researcher at UC Berkeley working on a project which utilizes wireless sensor networks for energy management applications. Since this is similar to some ideas I have been considering, I will be meeting up with him later in the week to see if we can pool our ideas and resources.

On the nature front, the San Jose Peregrines are getting bigger every day. Actually, they’re pretty much full grown now, and should start flying any day now. The picture on the left shows one of the chicks that has made it on to the top of the 2 foot high parapet next to their next box. They look quite similar to the adults now, except for the coloration. Apparently it will be a year or so until they develop their final adult plumage. In the mean time, I’m hoping to be able to spot them flying around the downtown San Jose area soon.

I have been interested in the green/clean technology market for quite a while, but I was not sure how to get involved. The problem I was facing was that my work experience did not seem to lend itself to any of the typical green tech disciplines: biofuels, fuel cells, solar cells, etc. I just wasn’t sure what I could do. Then I heard about the California Clean Tech Open (CCTO). It’s a business plan competition focused on green/clean tech related business ideas. It sounded like the perfect thing for me, but I still didn’t know what to do.

It turns out the CCTO was sponsoring a Technology and Entrepreneur Matching Event. The idea was a bunch of people interested in starting green businesses would meet up with a bunch of researchers with green technologies. The event was held at SRI in Menlo Park on June 4, 2007. It sounded like a perfect opportunity for me to find something to work on.

I was disappointed with the event for the most part. I guess I was expecting a bunch of guys showing of their cool, green technologies trying to connect with an entrepreneur partner. It turned out to be mostly research institutes (SRI, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, PARC, Sandia, EPRI, UC Davis and Stanford) talking about all the technologies they had to license and a bunch of entrepreneurs looking for money. There must have been at least 10 guys there from calcars.org promoting their plan to take their plug-in hybrid non-profit into the commercial sector.

I had almost given up hope, then I met one guy, Nathan, who was talking about his research project from UC Berkeley. He was using wireless sensor networks to improve the home thermostat by making it more efficient while at the same time improving comfort. I had been thinking about using wireless networks to monitor electrical consumption in the home, but this application could provide real financial value by saving the user money on their electric and gas bills. I chatted with the guy for a bit, but then I was shoved aside by the more aggressive entrepreneurs in the crowd.

I went home disappointed.